Pro wrestling executive and former Small Business Administration chief Linda McMahon will be the next and possibly last Education secretary, if confirmed. I didn't see that one coming. At all.
My first reaction is that Trump really does want to kill the U.S. Education Department, not redirect it.
McMahon served for a year on the Connecticut Board of Education and for much longer on the board of a Catholic university. As chair of the America First Policy Institute, she's backed extending federal Pell grants to cover short-term job training.
The institute's education agenda includes guaranteeing parents' rights to know what schools are teaching, expanding school choice programs and stopping schools from “promoting inaccurate and unpatriotic concepts” about American history.
As Education secretary, McMahon "would likely shift the focus of the department toward workforce development," writes Linda Jacobson on The 74.
“Having an education secretary that is focused on economic mobility and getting our kids prepared for the jobs and the economy in the future is not a bad thing,” Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, told her.
National Education Association President Becky Pringle called McMahon "grossly unqualified," for the job. Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers issued a conciliatory statement, saying the union is willing to work with McMahon. "We are pleased that Linda McMahon wanted to teach in her early life and that her work on the Connecticut State Board of Education led to her interest in literacy and building career pathways."
In a statement on Truth Social, the once-and-future President Trump wrote:
“Linda will use her decades of Leadership experience, and deep understanding of both Education and Business, to empower the next Generation of American Students and Workers, and make America Number One in Education in the World,” Trump wrote. “We will send Education BACK TO THE STATES."
If the department is eliminated, which is a long shot, some other federal department will have to take over funding programs for special-needs students and low-income students. Something will have to be done about the student loan program. Back in the day, there was HEW (Health, Education and Welfare). Recreating an old bureaucracy hardly seems worth the effort.
It would be pretty funny if, after four years, it turned out that all of the folks Trump put in place that were supposedly unqualified turned out to do about as good a job as the ones before them. In other words, at a high government policy level are simple intelligence and work ethic the main determinates and not credentials? It's an interesting experiment to try, that's for sure.
Supposedly the idea is to combine whatever programs that are remain from the Department of Education and move them into the Department of Labor. That would justify retain some form of federal student loans.
Your assumption is wrong, Joanne. The federal government could block grant transfer funding for needy kids to the States, which would regulate its spending on their own, in keeping with our own Tenth Amendment, the educational federalism still in practice in Canada, and American educational practice for most of our history: this article from Rick Hess's colleague at the American Enterprise Institute is the best I've read on how that proposal would work -- https://www.realcleareducation.com/2024/10/29/dont_close_the_department_of_education_break_it_up_1068470.html